Setting grounds your writing in the reality of place and illustrates theme of your story through commanding metaphor. Without setting, characters are simply there with no reason to act. Without a place there is no story and without a story there is novel. Setting intervenes with the plot, determines and describes character and gives metaphoric links to theme. In The Kite Runner, the physical journey to vast places functions as a deepermeaning to the book as a whole.
Throughout the novel The Kite Runner, several setting changes occur playing a central role in the book. The book begins in Kabul, Afghanistan where Amir is born in 1963. Years of warfare have decimated this country, shaping a place of no hope and despair. This plays an essential role as the setting, because this creates the drive needed for Amir to leave Afghanistan. Traveling across the border to Pakistan and sneaking on to a plane to the United States of America specifically California. Without an atmosphere of no hope and destruction, there is no need for the protagonist to leave. The setting itself, is the antagonist in the beginning of the book, because Kabul being corrupted filled with nefarious people creates a reason for Amir to leave and to better himself somewhere else.
Which leads us into our next setting, Fremont, California,that will motivate our character to undergo certain actions. While at California, this settings serves as an exile in a way where all Afghans stay around and gossip about what is occurring in their homeland. Rumors circulate in the air but nothing entertains Amir enough to care about it, however until one day he receives a call from his deceased father’s best friend Rahim Khan. He explains Amir’s best friend was brutally executed and his child Sohrab is left being sent to orphanage. Fremont being a save refugee compare to Afghanistan influences Amir decision to save Hassan’s son. Therefore, setting once again motivating the protagonist to make a certain decision. Without setting there is no story and no purpose for the characters to be there.
Kite fighting and flying kites symbolizes a deeper meaning throughout the book but not only that it has several interpretations to be taken away from it. When Amir tries to remember something that makes him happy, the first thing to come to his mind is flying kites. How ecstatic Hassan and him were to fly kites. The activity represented freedom and innocence; Amir and Hassan were too young to realize the hideous reality in front of them. All they had to worry about was if they were going to lose a kite fight or not. Rather than the constant warfare occurring around them costing people their lives. Children so oblivious to the world just enjoying some hobbies they have. Until Amir begins to reminisce about how he abandoned Hassan to Assef to be raped and losing his innocence. Something he will never forgive himself for being left with gruesome images drilled in his head. In losing his innocence, Hosseini leaves us with the puzzling question- Can we ever regain our innocence?
Though we can go even further into what flying kites’ means to Amir. In a way it is the only way to win his father’s love. Children with the intentions to only make their parents proud and to be loved by them. This drives Amir to be best kite runner around, because his passion for his dad to love him means the world to him. A feeling that he rarely feels from his father, Baba. Unfortunately he does but only for a miniscule period of time. Finally, when Amir and Sohrab fly kites at the very end of the novel, the kites allow Amir to return to the past without intense guilt. They are almost redemptive images by the end of the novel.
